Update on Scott Pruitt's EPA: Still Crooked

Well, how did you think this one would pan out?

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By
Charles P. Pierce

In 2011, the Environmental Protection Agency began a study of the proposed Pebble mine near Bristol Bay in southwest Alaska. The proposal would involve the construction of the largest open-pit mine in North America. Peer-reviewed studies have concluded that the project would threaten severely the valuable salmon fishery in Bristol Bay which, among other things, employs 14,000 people. In 2014, the Obama administration, using the Clean Water Act, put together a plan to preserve the bay and the industry that thrives upon it. Then, of course, last November happened. And the EPA was placed under the cash-and-carry leadership of Scott Pruitt. This should be sufficient explanation, but we’ll see what CNN says anyway.

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The meeting between EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and Tom Collier, CEO of Pebble Limited Partnership, took place on May 1, Collier and his staff confirmed in an interview with CNN. At 10:36 a.m. that same day, the EPA's acting general counsel, Kevin Minoli, sent an email to agency staff saying the administrator had "directed" the agency to withdraw an Obama-era proposal to protect the ecologically valuable wetland in southwest Alaska from certain mining activities.

Then followed the now-customary chorus of weaselspeak.

"This is a process issue," Collier told CNN in an interview. "[Pruitt] is not saying he's not going to veto this project. He's just saying that the rule of law says that you do an environmental impact statement first, right? That's Mr. Pruitt's position. And this is process, period. That's what we've always said."

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Of course, the EPA has studied what happens when you build a mine near a watershed. In fact, it’s done so again and again. In 2000, back in the days when the EPA was a gatekeeper and not an easily bribed maître d’, it commissioned a study of threats to the American water supply. It read, in part:

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Mining in the western United States has contaminated stream reaches in the headwaters of more than 40 percent of the watersheds in the West. EPA is spending $30,000 per day to treat contaminated mine drainage at the Summitville Mine in Colorado, which will cost an estimated $170 million to clean up. Remediation of the half-million abandoned mines in 32 states may cost up to $35 billion or more.

There’s no reason to believe that Pruitt’s EPA will find these conclusions compelling as regards the Pebble project. From CNN:

Collier's spokesman, Mike Heatwole, told CNN three additional people were present at the meeting on May 1. The EPA declined CNN's repeated requests for an interview with Pruitt, saying, most recently on September 5, that "we're focused on Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Irma." "The meeting was an opportunity for Administrator Pruitt to let [Pebble Limited Partnership] know that they are simply being granted a fair opportunity to apply; he did not prejudge the outcome of the process, nor make any assurances about the final decision on the project," Liz Bowman, an EPA spokeswoman, said in a statement issued to CNN on Friday.

But the process already seems rigged. Pruitt takes a private meeting with the Pebble CEO and the Obama plan is overturned the same morning. And it appears that the easily greased skids in this administration were readily available to the mine’s executives almost immediately.

Pebble had been trying to get this administration's ear before Pruitt was even confirmed as President Donald Trump's pick to head the EPA, according to government emails obtained by CNN from a public records request under the US Freedom of Information Act. On February 15, two days before Pruitt's swearing in, a lobbyist for the Pebble Partnership contacted a member of Trump's EPA transition team, according to the emails."As you may know, Pebble is trying to develop a world-class copper mine in southwestern Alaska," the lobbyist, Peter Robertson wrote. "We have yet to submit the first of the permit applications necessary to move ahead with the mine -- the permit application under section 404 of the Clean Water Act ... Do you have time for me to meet with you in the near future?"

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You have to love the appeal to Trumpish authority. “A world-class copper mine.” It stands with the golden commodes, all the best people, and the big beautiful wall with the big beautiful door in it. This mining guy knows which buttons to push.

The EPA transition staffer, David Schnare, replied the next morning. "I am aware of the problem in general but do not have specifics," Schnare wrote. "Can you bring with you a timeline of events and a status on the legal actions? The preemptive strike by the last administration was indeed unprecedented and I don't want to see it become a precedent, particularly because it is a violation of Pebble's due process rights." "In any case, I need to get this set up for the Administrator, which means I need the full background and a specific proposal on what we can and should do," Schnare continued. "Without meaning to be flip, that's your homework assignment."

The guffawing you hear is coming from 14,000 Alaskans who will be unemployed once they start pulling three-headed salmon out of Bristol Bay. But the logic of what this administration is doing remains inviolate. If the Obama people did something on their own because the Republicans in Congress determined in 2009 to gum up the works on "the black guy," then it is only a concern for constitutional order and due process that results in exactly what the oligarchs wanted in the first place. What you do, simply, is rig the system and then depend upon it for your alibi when you start selling off the country piecemeal.

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"We requested that [Pruitt] would set this aside," Collier, the Pebble CEO, told CNN. "And the moment the election occurred he and his staff took a look and determined to do so." "This was not a heavy lift," he said. "I mean this is something they ran on. You know, Scott Pruitt, you look at his statements for the last three years, every time he talks about environmental issues, the phrase he uses is 'rule of law.'And this was the classic rule of law case."

Scott Pruitt—defender of the integrity of American environmental law.

Yeah, that’ll fly.

UPDATE—Of course, Pruitt simply may be trying to clear his desk because his office is getting crowded. From The Washington Post:

The EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance has summoned agents from various cities to serve two-week stints helping guard Pruitt in recent months. While hiring in many departments is frozen, the agency has sought an exception to hire additional full-time staff to protect Pruitt. Shortly after the former Oklahoma attorney general assumed his post in February, aides requested 24/7 federal protection for him. “This never happened with prior administrators,” said Michael Hubbard, a former special agent who led the EPA’s Criminal Investigation Division office in Boston. Hubbard, along with other former and current employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal security issues, said agency investigators in Boston, Denver and other regional offices have been tapped for stints as part of Pruitt’s security detail.